Sun is allowing firms to pay for grid computing by the hour

Sun’s vision of a huge computing resource pool with utility pricing is finally about to go live in the US - but UK customers will be kept waiting for some time yet.

The Sun Grid will let organisations upload applications, run them and pay by credit card at a rate of $1 per CPU per hour.

In his blog entry today, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz confirmed that US users can try the Sun Grid Compute Utility service today and it will officially unveil the service this week. The service is accessible from www.network.com, a URL picked up with Sun’s acquisition of StorageTek.

The grid service is primarily aimed at firms with compute-intensive routines that need to be run on an occasional basis. Sun believes that the service will be a preferable alternative to capital expenditure on equipment and maintenance.

However, Schwartz said Sun has conceded that it will have to rely on a “long tail” of smaller companies rather than attracting blue-chip enterprises.

“Frankly, it's been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future,” he wrote. “[But] there are, after all, far more small financial institutions than large. The same applies to movie studios, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and nearly every other industry on earth.”

Schwartz added that the Sun Grid will only be available for customers inside the US at first, to comply with US restrictions on the export of technology.

However, he said international users should “stay tuned” and that the service would eventually be global. Even for the US, provisioning will initially take up to 24 hours in order for certain security routines to be run.

The service will begin with a total of under 5,000 CPU sockets – a mix of UltraSparc and Opetron processors – but that will be increased. Web services APIs will also be available to allow hybrid “mash-up” applications to be developed for the grid.